James Cummins Bookseller

N.p: n.d., 17th c.?].

Price: $2,500.00

About the item

Arabic manuscript, black ink on polished paper, 35 lines per page, some use of red, catchwords on versos, with numerous contemporary marginal glosses and addenda. 175 ff. 1 vols. 4to. Old boards with leather spine and flap. With extensive traces of worming in margins, including gutter margins but generally avoiding the text, which is uniformly legible (four pages with a few small smudged areas).

Item #251822

Substantial fragment of a gloss upon the Qur‘anic commentary of al-Baydawi (d. 1286?).
Al-Baydawi’s “great exegetic work was the Anwar al-tanzil wa-asrar al-ta’wil [The Lights of Revelation and the Mysteries of Interpretation]. This was not only a rather short work, very different in its approach from the method followed by such dialectical theologians as Maturidi and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, but it also became one of the single most popular commentaries on the Qur’an in all Islam. As such, it has been the subject of many glosses.” C. Gilliot, “Quranic exegesis”, in History of Civilization of Central Asia v.4 pt. 2.